How Flexbase made me a super coder

I have always been passionate about writing code – don’t know why..! And when I joined Sumeru as a fresher trainee, I was given 3 months of training on C# .net and Flexbase and was soon writing code for an in-house WAF product. 

I jumped into creating controllers, plugins for validations, queries, working with message queues,  Enterprise service Bus…. the works.  And when I used to share what I was doing with my classmates/batchmates – they would look at me incredulously -as though I was lying.  They were in much bigger companies and were either part of some maintenance project or were doing some simple production fixes. They were thoroughly bored with what they were doing and just refused to believe me!!

It was then that I realized the value of Flexbase – that even a less-experienced developer like me could effortlessly work on advanced architectural patterns and more importantly not lose focus on the customer’s domain!!  After all, aren’t we writing software to help the customer solve some challenges in their business domain?

In a recent assignment, the customer needed an application that could administer a questionnaire and based on the user responses execute different workflows. This is was in a covid health-related context.

The catch was that the questionnaire’s flow/format was not pre-fixed and the subsequent workflow actions were also to be configurable by the administrators of the application. This meant that there could be absolutely no hardcoding of questions/ workflow actions. 

Our chief architect @Satyajit Behera came up with the complex domain models needed for the questionnaire and workflow functionalities on Flexbase.  And to everyone’s surprise (including my Project manager), the back-end API coding for the questionnaire module was done in  3 weeks by a team of 2 and for the workflow module in 1 week by a team of 3 !!! In all, a total of around 42APIs were created.  

All this happened at the peak of the second Covid wave in India and everyone in our API development team was paid a visit by the dreaded virus too!! Since Flexbase provided all the plumbing code for the complex domain models, creating the APIs became much smoother and simpler and hence we could deliver what was needed in a short time without adding to an already stressful situation.

Now with almost 4 years of working with Flexbase and on different domains like   Cyber security, Covid response and Flex Studio – I am able to appreciate even more what working with Flexbase and the creator of Flexbase @Satyajit Behera has done for my understanding of software architecture, customer domain, and writing code.

The #JoyofCoding is real!!